


Tuesday, April 8th

by nadinehurley



Series: (Eulogy For) An Adolescence Shattered [3]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gender Identity, Goth music, Other, Recreational Drug Use, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:49:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24947932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nadinehurley/pseuds/nadinehurley
Summary: “Can I ask you a question?” Prouvaire asks, breaking the comfortable silence they’ve been sharing with Ian Curtis. He drags his foot slowly across the leopard print bath mat barely disguising the cracks in the linoleum floor.“Okay,” Montparnasse says, inhaling deeply. He closes his amber eyes.Or: Prouvaire and Montparnasse hotbox a bathroom and talk about their feelings.
Relationships: Montparnasse/Jean Prouvaire
Series: (Eulogy For) An Adolescence Shattered [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1304960
Kudos: 14





	Tuesday, April 8th

**Author's Note:**

> Just found this thing languishing in my Google Drive & decided I wasn't going to add any more to it so I guess it's finished. It's self-indulgent as fuck.
> 
> I think this was a contribution to Montprouvaire week on Tumblr last year. I'm so bad at posting things on time / in general.
> 
> CW: They smoke a lot of pot. They're always smoking pot.

Jehan Prouvaire is sitting in an empty bathtub smoking out of an enormous clear glass bong.

It’s Tuesday. The bathroom is the only room in the apartment well ventilated enough that the neighbors don’t complain when he smokes; it feels juvenile, but it will have to do.

Prouvaire cannot afford to get evicted again.

A Joy Division song plays tinnily from a cracked cell phone balanced precariously on the edge of the counter, haphazard between a tube of toothpaste, and nail clippers, and bottles of facial cleanser, and a stack of battered play scripts _ ,  _ for some reason. Montparnasse sits on the floor with his back to the door, and he’d like to ask himself how he got here: here smoking marijuana in a cramped bathroom like they’re teenagers again, effectively sitting at the feet of someone so strange, who’s dressed so  _ badly  _ \- in pantyhose and an Insane Clown Posse t-shirt, three sizes too big on his bony frame.

He’d like to ask himself how, but they both already know.

Jehan Prouvaire is beautiful.

Jehan Prouvaire is beautiful and all the other adjectives in his poetry chapbooks and Jehan Prouvaire has got Montparnasse by the balls; like a vice; like every cliche in the book and then some.

A slender leg hangs over the edge of the bathtub, bare except for the sheer black pantyhose. The crappy stick-and-poke tattoos on Prouvaire’s calf and ankle are visible; his toenails are painted black, and chipped. He exhales sticky-sweet, skunky smoke into the air between them and hands the bong to Montparnasse with a pale, freckled hand.

Montparnasse pretends to ignore the subtle eroticism of it all; pretends he’s not powerless in the dynamic that’s at work here.

“Can I ask you a question?” Prouvaire asks, breaking the comfortable silence they’ve been sharing with Ian Curtis. He drags his foot slowly across the leopard print bath mat barely disguising the cracks in the linoleum floor.

“Okay,” Montparnasse says, inhaling deeply. He closes his amber eyes.

“You don’t have to answer, I guess. But like - uh. Hmm.” Prouvaire, eloquent and infuriatingly well-spoken even at the worst and most intoxicated times is rarely at a loss for words. He bites his chapped bottom lip.

“Spit it out,” Montparnasse says, ever delicate and sensitive to the needs of others. His eyes are still closed.

“Were you always comfortable with your gender identity?” Prouvaire asks. “I mean - did you always feel like you had the right language for it?”

“What?” Montparnasse asks. He opens his eyes and hits the bong again. His black eyeliner is smudged. “I don’t know. I was a poor, dumb kid growing up on the South side. I didn’t have the language for anything. I don’t think it was comfortable - I just knew I was a boy, and everyone else had to live with it as much as I did.”

He doesn’t know why he’s revealing this part of himself to Prouvaire, except that he had asked. Prouvaire brushes his fingers, reaching for the bong, electric.

Montparnasse inhales again, clean air this time, and counts slowly inside his head: One, two, three…

Prouvaire looks regal in the bathtub, despite the holey Insane Clown Posse t-shirt and the drug paraphernalia. His long strawberry blonde hair is piled on top of his head and his wet, glassy eyes are faraway, lost in thought. He breathes out smoke like a dragon.

“Why do you ask?” Montparnasse says finally, and it mostly doesn’t come out as a croak. “You’re one to talk about comfort,” he dares. “You always seem so comfortable with everything.”

Prouvaire hums softly. He holds the bong reverently; stares into the dirty water at the bottom as if it might possibly hold all the answers. “I don’t know,” he says. “I suppose there’s always comfort to be found, even in chaos.”

His cracked iPhone is playing a Bauhaus song now.

Then he says: “I don’t think I have a gender. I don’t think I ever have.”

“Okay,” Montparnasse says. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it really matters. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about, I suppose.”

“It only matters as much as you want it to matter, I guess,” Montparnasse says, feeling ineloquent and inadequate. Surely one of Prouvaire’s faux-impoverished intellectual friends from the punk house is more well-versed in queer theory and more well-suited to be having this conversation than he is.

(But Prouvaire is sharing this with  _ him,  _ and Montparnasse won’t dwell on what that means any more than he won’t dwell on the soft  _ scritch  _ of Prouvaire’s pantyhose still scraping against the bath mat.)

“That’s true, isn’t it? Things only ever have as much meaning as we ascribe to them.”

Then:

There is a sharp knock on the bathroom door.

“Will you come out, please?” asks Prouvaire’s roommate, Combeferre. “I need to get ready for my meeting.”

Montparnasse scrubs a hand through his artfully messy black hair. “A prayer meeting?” He asks, arching his eyebrows exaggeratedly at Prouvaire, who stifles a laugh with his bony fingers.

“A PSL meeting,” Combeferre says evenly, their voice tinged around the edges with annoyance and their apparent distaste for Montparnasse.  _ “Please?” _

“Just a minute,” Prouvaire calls. He rolls his eyes exaggeratedly, but the look on his face is mostly fond. He sets the bong down next to the bathtub and stretches luxuriously.

“Well,” he says, softer now. “Thanks for listening to me.” 

He pauses. 

“Do you want to have sex?”

“You’re not going to the prayer meeting?” Montparnasse asks stupidly, mouth dry.

“Not this one. I’m an anarchist, not a communist.” There is a glint of mischief in his watery, bloodshot eyes. “I asked you a question: do you want to have sex with me?”

“Yes,” Montparnasse says, equally as stupid as before. “Yes, I do.”

“Get up,” Prouvaire tells him, and Montparnasse complies; will always comply. 

He brushes dust and hair off of his designer jeans, and helps Prouvaire out of the bathtub.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr](https://kruideniers.tumblr.com) & let's talk shit about Jean Prouvaire dressing like a Juggalo.


End file.
